WHOOP Podcast - Breaking Down Common Nutrition Misconceptions with Dr. Sarah Berry

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

On this week’s episode of the WHOOP Podcast, WHOOP SVP of Research, Algorithms, and Data, Emily Capodilupo sits down with Associate Professor in Nutritional Sciences at King’s College London and Chief Scientist at ZOE, Dr. Sarah Berry. Dr. Berry focuses on the influences of diet and nutrition on cardiovascular disease risk through the processes of precision nutrition, postprandial metabolism, and food and fat structure. Dr. Berry has conducted a number of studies relating to the impact of ultra-processed food on health, menopause, and symptoms of chronic illness. This episode debunks some common misconceptions and important information around nutrition and satiety.(00:36) Misconceptions about seed oils(11:35) Common Nutrition Misconceptions(16:39) The Chemical Breakdown of Food Processing(29:28) Changing The Composition of Food: Satiety and Nutrition(40:31) 4 Tips To Improve Your Nutrition(48:59) Benefits of Using Wearables to Conduct StudiesFollow Dr. Sarah BerryInstagramXSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What we eat is this one piece of the puzzle. We need to think holistically. There's many pillars to hell. There's the food that we eat. There's physical activity. There's sleep, there's stress. We need to think of all of that because we know that they all intersect. My advice to people would be, yes, think about what you eat,

but there's this whole area of how you eat that I think people can also leverage. And this is where we've had some really exciting research. Hi, everybody. Today I am joined by the incredible Dr. Sarah Berry. We are so, so excited to have you here all the way from London in the Woot Podcast Studio. So let's get started. We're going to start spicy. You've done a lot of research that seed oils are not the evil they've been made out to be.

What do people need to know? I think people need to know there's lots of misinformation generally about nutrition. And I think seed oils epitomizes the worst of the worst in terms of the misinformation that's out there. If you go into social media, you'll see all of these headlines saying seed oil. are toxic, seed oils are going to kill us, seed oils are going to cause all of these terrible diseases. But the evidence doesn't support that. The evidence from human randomized control trials doesn't support that at all. And actually what the totality of the evidence shows is that seed oils are safe for us and it actually can be a really healthy part of our diet.

I personally love that because they're a part of my diet. So I love when people tell me I don't need to worry about things. But I'd love to talk about and use this as like a jump off point, you do nutrition research. It seems like so much of the nutrition information out there is like contradictory, confusing, misleading. Like, why is this such a difficult field? Like, it should be kind of straightforward. What's good for us? What's bad for us? Why is it so hard? I think there's loads of different reasons. I think one is what do we all do? We all eat. So we all have an opinion on it. I mean, 50 years ago, it wasn't as polarized as it is now and there wasn't as much of misinformation because we didn't have social media. We also,

I don't think really understood just how important nutrition was for our health. So I think what we've seen in the last 10, 20 years is this explosion into social media and different routes of communication, different routes of miscommunication, but also everyone's suddenly realizing, hey, what I eat really matters. And against this, we've got the backdrop of this, you know, broken food landscape. We've got these heavily processed unhealthy foods, very little access for some people to really healthy food. So we've kind of got this perfect storm going on. And I think this is where seedles is a perfect example of where we've got lots of things

colliding. So if we look at seedalls, for example, we know that actually 60% of seedles is in these heavily processed, so these ultra-processed foods are unhealthy for us. You could say, well, okay, seedles are bad for us because they're in these terrible foods. But what the evidence shows is not the seedles themselves are bad for us. It's all of the other terrible things that are going on with these heavily processed foods where you've got the food structure destroyed, where you've got many of these unhealthy additives, emulsifiers,

where they're low in fibre, et cetera. So that's one thing that we know is that, you know, people are often confusing what we call association with causality, that at the point in time that we're increasing our intake of ultra-processed foods, we're increasing our intake of seedles, we're having an increased prevalence of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers. So it's very easy to say, oh, well, it's because of a seed,

oils. Well, I think the data shows from randomized controlled trials where everything helps in the diet is controlled and only seed oils are added in. Now, you do have to recognize that to add something kin to the diet, you've got to take something away. But trials that maybe, you know, swap butter or other fat sources for seed oils, they consistently show in human studies that there's no negative impact on health that actually they lower blood cholesterol, they lower the risk of cardiovascular disease. Importantly, also, they have either a neutral or lowering effect on levels of inflammation. But there's still this misinformation out there based on this association, but also based on

theoretical biochemical pathways. So we know CDORs have a really high amount of a particular fat called omega-6. And we know that omega-6 can undergo conversion in the body to a very long-chain version of omega-6 called arachadonic acid. And upon the right stimuli, this can release certain chemical. which are called the cosinoids and that these can have pro-inflammatory effects they can cause blood clotting etc now that's normal we need to our blood to clot we need inflammation you know at the right time and the right place that's really really important if I was to cut my finger and weren't able to

produce these particular chemicals these are cosinoids and I wouldn't stop bleeding but there is this argument by people in my opinion wrongly put out that while they're you know seedors are therefore because of this fatty acid they're pro-inflammatory they're pro-coagulatory they're pro-coagulatory they're really bad for us, we're all having too much inflammation, etc. But our bodies are really, really, really clever. And as long as we've got an appropriate amount of the other kind of fat called our omega-3 fat, and as long as there aren't other external things going on that are disturbing these pathways, actually by increasing our seed oil intake, by increasing the amount of omega-6,

we don't increase our inflammation. And yet it all sounds that, you know, if you dive into these things, theoretical pathways, which a lot of people do, it's a great argument, but it doesn't play out in human bodies. What we see in rats, what we see in a petri dish, it doesn't play out in humans. Yeah, I think important reminder that we're not mice and that animal studies are super important. And we're not a test tube either. Yeah. I've noticed that about myself. So to summarize what you've just said, and it's absolutely fascinating, you know, seed oils have gotten a bit of a bad rap because they tend to hang out with things that are bad for us,

in particular ultra-process foods, and that people are way over-hyping the fact that seed oils contain these omega-6s, which can result in clotting and in inflammation, but that that's actually super-critical physiological functioning and not happening, at least as far as the science can tell us, in any kind of dangerous or problematic level. Yeah, absolutely. And our body only turns on this inflammation and this co-regulation when it's needed. And I think that's really important to remember. And I think there's one last point that's often made in order to talk about seedles in a negative way is around their naturalness or rather unnaturalness, that we should all be having butter or beef tallow because it's natural. And yet seedores have gone to all of these really evil processes and they're not natural. And they're

therefore they must be harmful for us. And there has been quite a bit of research looking at how the processing of seed oils changes the composition compared to coal-pressed, where it doesn't go through quite so many processes. And the evidence shows that there are minor differences in some of the minor kind of bioactors, but that generally the composition is almost identical. There haven't been enough studies in humans comparing the coal-press, the unrefined, with the process.

It would be interesting to see that. But I think based on what we do know, I believe that their processing techniques that are used for seed oils would not have any harm either on humans. And indeed, studies that compare feeding people butter versus the refined seed oils show that the refined seed oils consistently improve health outcomes. Okay, so this is like a pretty spicy take, right?

This is a bit counter to some of the stuff you're seeing out there and there's so many little bits that you just said that I want to follow up on. But two questions. You mentioned that it can cause a little bit of inflammation and that that is actually really important. If you are somebody who is struggling with inflammation, your inflammatory markers, you know, when you go to the doctor, we're high and it's something you're trying to manage,

would you say to those people to limit seed oils or even then you think that it's not going to increase inflammation in your body? So based on the evidence, I would say that the randomized control trials show that if you increase people's seed oil intake, you do not increase inflammation. You do not increase circulating inflammatory measures. What I would say is having spoken about this topic quite recently on a podcast where I was absolutely overwhelmed with quite vitriolic comments that I was wrong, despite researching this area for many, many years, that there were so many people that said, oh, I cut out seed oil. and my inflammation went down, i.e., you know, my bones felt better or etc. Now, if cutting something out works for you, absolutely great. But what I would say to all of those people

who saw that benefit, which I think is fantastic, what was it that they were actually cutting out? Was it the cedores or was it all of these processed foods that have got all of these other chemicals that would be doing that harm? What we also know on inflammation is that, again, And if you supplement with high levels seed oils or high levels of omega-6, you don't get an increase in the tissue level of this particular fatty acid that releases these pro-inflammatory

chemicals. So this particular fatty acid is called arachadonic acid. And what we know is in our body, if you have high intakes of seed oils and omega-6, yes, some enzymes convert it to this very long-chain arachadonic acid. But studies have shown even when you supplement at high levels, you don't have an increase in tissue levels, which is surprising if you look at the biochemical pathway, but that's because there's so many other things that play, and our bodies are just so clever at regulating what it does need and what it doesn't need. So I don't know if there's any studies that have specifically

taken people who have inflammatory conditions and specifically limited seed oils. I'm not aware of these studies. What I would say is if you find cutting something out of your diet and if it happens to be what you think is seed oils, but it might be all the other old processed food, if that works for you. But I would say there is no clinical trial evidence currently to show that increasing ocedural intake will increase inflammation and so forth. Yeah, and one of the things that's so interesting and I think underappreciated that you've been touching on a couple of the points that you've made is like, you know, a lot of people when they're cutting out seed oils, they're cutting out packaged food and the clinical trials that you referenced specifically took exactly the same food and

replace just the seed oil with butter and that's why that makes it a really interesting trial versus saying like, hey, cut out seed oils all of a sudden you're not eating anything processed and you're like, oh, I feel amazing and you blame the seed oil. And like people sometimes don't realize that, you know, food is a zero-sum game. Anything you're taking out to getting like replaced with something else. And so whether or not like that swap is beneficial, you have to look at, well, did you replace it by like not using oils? But now you're eating a lot more avocado. and you're getting, you know, a ton of fiber with that or something else, you know, that, like, it's not isolated to the one thing.

And people should be careful, I think, with elimination diets and things like that because you can end up making other tradeoffs or unnecessarily limiting your diet. So I'm curious, like, you touched a little bit on experimentation, and if taking this out feels good to you, you know, to do it. But how would you actually practically recommend people play with these things so that they don't just, like, cut, cut, cut, cut, and blame the wrong things. Yeah, so I think that's a really interesting. point. As a nutrition scientist, it's the instead of what is really critical. And when I'm

designing research studies, the hardest thing is the control or how we're going to achieve this dietary change. What are we taking out in order to add that in? How do I know that the effect I'm seeing, for example, the benefit of seedalls, is because of the seed all itself or because of what I'm taking out in order to add that in? And that's the hardest thing to get right. I think there's an important point to pick up on though it on the instead of what around the miscommunication is depending on what you swap it on you can see an entirely different result and there's an example I often give to the students that I teach around dietary fat where there was on the same day two different headlines in the paper from the same study one was in a tabloid paper in in the UK which basically

means it's not such a high brow paper sure I don't know if you have the same here in the US we've got Junky news sources. And it's like nutrition scientists have got it all wrong again. Saturated fats are good for us. And then from the same study in a broadsheet, so better paper, it said nutrition scientists confirm saturated fats are bad for our health. Okay, so you've got one paper saying saturated fats are really good for us and we don't know what we're talking about.

Another saying, hey, we do know what we're talking about and saturated fats are actually not good for us. It was the same study. And this was a study where they'd done what's called a metronalysis, so that they'd taken hundreds and hundreds of different trials and looked at if you replace different types of fats with saturated fat or different types of carbohydrates, how does that change health outcomes like all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease and so forth.

And what they found is if you exchange refined carbohydrates for saturated fats, there's no difference in these health outcomes, both as bad as each other. if you exchange trans fats which actually we don't even consume anymore but that's a whole other myth with saturated fat you actually get even better because trans fats are so bad for us if you exchange mono or polyunsaturated fats or whole grain carbohydrates complex carbohydrates with saturated fats you get worse health outcomes and so it's about the instead of what and that's what can lead to these two different headlines so the sensible headline showing actually saturated fat compared to these other fats compared to whole grains

are still really unfavourable in terms of these many different health outcomes. Saturated fat compared to trans, which we don't eat anymore, refined carbidates, which we know are bad, actually are not having an additive negative effect, so we've got it all wrong. You can see why this miscommunication comes out. And then, also, nutrition is so nuanced, and so even then if we were to talk about saturated fat and cholesterol and health outcomes, we know that not all saturated fat, that behaves the same. So, for example, we know saturated fat in fermented dairy because of the very special structure of dairy actually doesn't seem to have the negative effect on cholesterol,

on heart disease, could potentially even have a beneficial effect, yet saturated fat and butter, the unfurmented dairy, despite being the same as in cheese nearly, does have a negative effect. So it does also get so complicated and trying to, you know, put the information out there without confusing people and hopefully I haven't confused your listeners, now already, you know, is really difficult for nutritionists. And so it's easy for people to take kind of the quick clickbait, the headline. And everyone loves to be able to say someone's wrong as well. Yeah. So I think let's break down what you just said, because there's a lot in there. And I think you're just a couple of really interesting things, right? That, you know, the instead of

what is really important. Because I think we have such a desire to say like, avocados equal good. You know, trans fat equals bad. And like, there are certain things that are probably. probably just good, blueberries, kale, whatever. And then there are certain things that are just bad. And then there's a lot of mush in the middle where it's like we had an MD and a nutritionist on the podcast a couple weeks ago. And he said, you know, people ask me if bananas are healthy. And he's like, well, if the alternative is blueberries, then no.

If the alternative is like, you know, a granola bar that's packaged or whatever, then yes, eat the banana for breakfast. And like, you know, we'd love to sort of create these little checklists of, you know, I need to have, you know, this much protein, this much carbs, or, like, you know, get everything into an Instagram post and, and what your research shows and why I enjoy reading it so much is, like, there's so much more nuance, right? Saturated fat, depending on how it's packaged and not just, you know, the commercial packaging, but literally even in your home kitchen, like what you are putting it in, how you're preparing it wildly changes how it shows up in your body. And so all of a sudden, we can't just make these, like, cute little checklists for ourselves of what's good and what's bad. Can you help us understand this a bit?

Like, if I have, let's say something totally pure, like a mango, right? And I just peel it and eat it. That's a whole food. That's good. If I put it in a smoothie, that's processing. You've already said ultra-processed is bad. I don't think smoothie counts as ultra-processed, but have I made it worse? And how should I think about that?

And then if I dry it, all I did was take out water. Have I made it worse? How do I think about these things? Yeah, so I think I would avoid saying making it worse, that you have made it different. You've made it different in terms of how you will digest it, how quickly you will digest it, how much of it you will digest it, how much of it you will digest it, because you're changing the structure of the food. Okay, explain this to me. So we now know that food is so much more than just the simple nutrients. So exactly like Christopher Gardner said, it's about the nutrients that are in it. yes they do play a bit of a role it's about the thousands of other chemicals so food isn't just

you know fat fiber protein carbohydrate there's thousands of chemicals bioactives we've heard of things like polyphenols etc and these nutrients and these bioactives are encapsulated within the food matrix which simply put is the structure of the food and that structure modulates how those nutrients how those bioactives impact our health. And this is becoming really, really relevant now that so much of the food that we're eating is processed. And when people talk about processed food, if I can just go off on a tangent for a moment,

people often think about processed foods, it's bad for us because it's got this additive, it's got this emulsifier. Yes, processed food has a lot of additives and emulsifiers. We don't know how they impact our health. Yes, ultra-processed food tends to be low in fibre, higher in saturated fat, salt, sugar. But what's also changed about ultra-processed food, the texture, the food structure and the food matrix. And there's been some great research that has compared nutritionally similar food, whether it's minimally processed or ultra-processed,

and we see that we eat it 50% more quickly. We see that the texture has changed. We see that the energy density has changed. so it's on average about 40 to 50% more energy dense meaning per gram of that food there's about twice as many calories in the old process versus the minimally process now this doesn't apply to all foods it's important to say that we're talking about averages and so an area that I've been really fascinated in for many years even before old processed foods was was coined even a term is this whole area of food structure food matrix and how changing the food structure changes that

texture, changes the energy density, changes the rate at which you eat your food. And I think it's something that hasn't been given enough consideration in our food. And if we take your mango example, I'd love to go back to a study that actually was done in 1977. It was by a guy called Haber. It was one of the first nutrition studies ever published in the Lancet. And it was around processing. So it wasn't, this whole thing isn't kind of a new thing that, or certainly isn't a new thing that I'd like to think I invented in terms of the research 10 years ago. But it says back in 97th, the year I was born, 48 years ago. And what he did was he didn't use mangoes, but he used apples.

And so he took whole apples, he took pureed apples. So it was exactly the same nutritional composition, but he just pureed it. So like you said, put it in a blender. And then he took apple juice. So the fibre was taken out. It was just the juice. And he fed it to individuals. And he looked at all different things in that kind of.

immediate eight hours after eating it. One of the things that he found was that there was a big difference in glucose peaks, so the speed at which the glucose went up and also the dip in the glucose, whereby the puree caused a bigger one compared to the whole apples, and the juice caused an even bigger one compared to the whole apples. But what he also noticed was there was a huge, huge difference, three to fourfold difference in the speed at which people ate these. and so you could just argue, well, people were eating the puree a couple of times more quickly,

the apple juice five to six times more quickly, so of course you're going to get these differences. So you then repeated the experiment, and he asked everyone to eat the three different foods at exactly the same rate. So you had people having the whole apples, you had people having the puree, remember, identical composition, and then you had people having the juice at exactly the same speed. What he still saw was differences in hunger. So he saw, despite having the same speed, people felt more hungry after having the puree or the apple juice. He saw big differences in what we call the glucose dip. So two to four hours after consuming refined carbohydrates or any kind of carbohydrates, some people have a dip.

We know from our own Zori predict research, that causes you to be less alert, more hungry, have less energy, go on to eat a couple of hundred calories more at your next meal. He saw bigger dips following the puree and the juice. and he saw big differences in gut hormones which we know were related to hunger and satiety like GLP. So this was a study done in the 70s. There hadn't been that much research until about the last 10, 15 years, my groups and a group out here in the States has started doing more research. And we've been doing similar kinds of research looking at how just changing the structure of food can impact its health outcomes. So this is a fascinating study. So I think most

people who are paying a lot of attention to nutrition have a general sense that like when you juice something and you take out all the fiber right you're concentrating the sugar and i think the outcomes around the juice maybe are a bit more intuitive it's super interesting when you just talk about puring the apple so all you did was nothing came out right and you didn't cook it you just blended it so it's the same apple and then you have this wildly different physiological response even after controlling for the fact that it's much easier to kind of shovel that in and eat quickly. So is the integrity of the fiber getting disrupted in the blender, or how do you think about that? So we think lots of things are going on, and there's two studies I've done myself that I think can illustrate quite nicely what we think is going on.

So one is using almonds, so using almond nuts, where we fed people whole almonds, and then we fed people ground almonds that have been industrially ground so again a little bit like the whole apple and the smoothie you'd ground it down so you'd broken up the structure of those almonds and when you feed it that to individuals what you see is about a 30% difference in the amount of calories or fat that's being absorbed so when you consume the almonds that have been finely ground you absorb all of the nutrients all of the fat when you consume the whole almonds which yes you chew but you chew on average to a particle size of about one millimeter, about 30% of the calories come out in your poo. And that's because of the cell structure. And so almonds and all nuts and many plant-based foods, you know, you have a very rigid

cell structure. So in an almond nut, for example, you've got thousands and thousands and thousands of cells. Each of those cells is surrounded by a cell wall, which is essentially the fiber. And it's inside those cells that you have the fat and the other nutrients. Now, when you grind it, you fracture all of those cell walls. You're releasing all of the nutrients. When you put it in your mouth, yes, you're releasing some. Only about 10% of the fats released upon chewing. Then some more is released as it passes through the gastrointestinal tract.

But on average, you've still got 30% of these intact cells coming out in your poo. And like if anyone's got kids, as a mom, often you look at their poo. You'll see that there's whole, if you feed your children any kind of nuts, you all see the chunks coming out. You actually see it physically in the poo. And so we know there's about a 30% difference. We also know it differentially affects where it's absorbed. So we know that if a food is less processed, so like the whole almonds,

it's absorbed further down the gastrointestinal tract. Further down the gastrointestinal tract, you have more receptors related to fullness, so you're more likely to feel full. It also changes your post-meal responses, which we call the post-pranage responses. So if you have the finely ground, almonds we see a really big peak in circulating blood fat about four to six hours and we see a 50% lower peak in blood fat four to six hours after the whole almonds and yeah and that's just an almonds and then we've done studies on carbohydrate rich foods like wheat and oats that also i think really

illustrate it as well yeah so i've actually i've read about your almond study so one of the things you've touched on which i think you know the sort of tweetable instagramable nature of a lot of the nutrition information people are consuming just doesn't create room for, is that it's not, you know, the way that we eat food, even things that feel minimally processed, like throwing a nut in your blender, really changes the way that our body experiences that. And there's a lot of really interesting, and this is for a couple of different reasons, right, that things are getting absorbed in different parts of your digestive tract. And in many cases, like in almonds, not coming out even fully digested at

all. When you think about from an evolutionary perspective, all of this super industrial ground almonds or ultra-processed food really hasn't existed for very long. And so our bodies evolved for that almond to get digested. Our bodies didn't evolve to have that sort of pre-powdered or pre. And so it doesn't respond quote-unquote appropriately when it has access. to all of that. I'd see it as a little bit like a double-edged sword. So I think that by doing all of that grinding, you're absorbing more fat, you're absorbing it more quickly, and in, you know, the abysogenic environment that we live in, for many people, that's a problem. But we also have to remember there are some people that don't have adequate calorie intake, not many, where they

would actually benefit from that process. Yeah, that's where I was going, because like, if you don't love nuts, but you've been told they're good for you, and so you want to incorporate them into your diet, or if affording enough calories is an issue, would you recommend that somebody, you know, powder their nuts in a blender or stick them in a smoothie in order to get kind of more nut per nut? I mean, it's a good point,

because there's also other benefits of processing. When you grind the nuts, there's so many other nutrients that are within those cell walls. Like, for example, taking almonds, they're packed with vitamin E. And so again, from our own research, we know that if you grind them, you're getting more of the vitamin E.

So there are multiple benefits, but given that the majority of us need to think perhaps about our energy intake, then I think the majority of us, that's where we would need to think, well, do we want the whole nuts or the powdered nuts? The other thing to mention, because I do get asked this a lot,

is what about nut butters? What about the ground nut butters? Does that mean I shouldn't eat them? If you are grinding your nuts at home, you are very, very unlikely, unless you've got some million-pound equipment sitting in your kitchen, to be able to grind it to the level that you break down all of these cell walls. The cell walls in most nuts are smaller than a grain of sand. They're micrometers, they're tiny.

Even the industrial processes typically that are used to create nut butters, yes, they release more, but they don't actually release all of it. So you're still maintaining the structure and integrity of some of it. And so I wouldn't want people listening to say, oh, my gosh, I can't have nut butters now because it's releasing all of the fat, it's being absorbed in different places. The evidence shows they are still really, really healthy for you. What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop.

That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain, and you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. It sounds like there's a really interesting takeaway here that if you eat a whole nut versus that same nut that's been turned into a nut butter, even if you go and you buy that nut butter, you buy that

nut butter and it's single ingredient, you know, just peanuts or just almonds, pound for pound, you're going to get more calories. And so if your goal is weight loss, and I think people often hear nuts are great for weight loss, that's specifically related to whole nuts. And when we're eating whole nuts as compared to that exact same ingredient turned into a butter, because of all the chewing and whatnot that comes with that, we also tend to eat it much more. slowly than if you just are eating peanut butter by the spoon, you'll end up eating a lot more peanuts than you would if you had a bag of peanuts, and even more so if you have to shell them as you go. And that might kind of trick us into eating more than we want to and not get those

satiety signals. Can you talk more about that? Yeah, absolutely. That's a great playback. There was an even added layer of complexity, which is that also we know that we always, we always, respond very differently in terms of those almond nuts, for example. And so there was a study carried out here in the US where they fed people over a period of time whole almonds and they looked at what we call them metabolizable energy. So literally how much of energy they're absorbing. And that's where they saw on average 25 to 30 percent was actually just being excreted. But if you looked across the people in the study, some people were actually absorbing everything. So per portion, which is about an people were getting the full 160, 170 calories.

On average, people are getting about 130 calories. And that's what typically, when we do nutrition research, we present the average. There were some people that were only getting about 60 calories. So you were seeing a difference between, like, let's call them the super absorbers and the bad absorbers, nearly 100 calories. That means how many calories I'm absorbing from it versus how many you're absorbing from it could be up to 700 calories over the week despite eating the same food. It is so complicated. This is why there's so much missing information, but also why we have

to think about what works for us as well, as individuals. That's fascinating. So 700 calories a week if you're doing that is way over a pound a week worth of calories. And so for the year, you and I are going on the same clean eating thing. And I'm getting 700 more calories from that same portion of almonds that you're getting, we could be upwards of 50, 60 pounds different in weight loss and really frustrated if you're the one who just isn't seeing those results. How can you know at an individual level? Let's imagine you are either trying to carefully maintain weight or even lose a little bit of weight, which foods might be ones that you could really enjoy and be a kind of poor, caloric absorber of? Or is this a wrong weight at the

think about it because are those people also getting way fewer nutrients and so maybe it's just not a great food for them. Yeah, again, it's that double-edged sword. So, you know, I might be getting all of the calories, but I might also be getting all of the phytosterols and the vitamin E and all of the other wonderful things. And so it's a really tricky one and it's something that we don't know the answer to. We also don't know why are some people absorbing more than others. This is new research, you know it's very recent research is it that actually some people are eating the nuts more quickly so because they're eating them more quickly they're not chewing them as much you know is that one of the reasons and we know that chewing you know has a big impact eating weight has a big impact on our

energy intake etc is it because their microbiome is different because we know that you also get fermentation of some of the nut cells that are left in your gut and that's using up some not much but some of the energy there's so many different reasons and so this. is why it is really difficult and it's why it's really difficult as well when you've got one person saying you know your friend saying oh my gosh you know I've started doing this I feel great feel younger feel full all the time you try it and it's like doesn't work for me and this is part of the problem as well with some of these celebrity diets or proponents out there saying I started doing this look at me I feel amazing and everyone starts following it well great fantastic at work for

that person. But is there evidence that will work for everyone else? Yeah, I think there's like a really great piece of practical advice there, which is that, you know, if you're on a diet and it's not working, switch. Like, you got to mix it up. And I think too often people like get even stricter, like even more, or they just kind of give up completely and diets don't work for me and get frustrated. But yeah, it's, I think probably news to a lot of people, right? Like just nuts are sort of unequivocally this great diet food, but there could be, it sounds like, as much as a 3x difference in what you're colorically and nutritionally getting. And so, yeah, and I think I would use it more as a way of illustrating how changing the structure of food does actually

impact. So they would have had identical back-upac labeling. And there's another study that we conducted, which is broadly similar, where we fed large wheat particles and then finely ground. So a bit like large porridge versus very finely ground porridge. What we found was that there was a big difference, despite identical back-a-pack labelling, identical ingredients, identical chemicals. There was a big difference in that post-mill glucose response, in levels of hunger, levels of fullness, levels of gLP, one, for example. We fed them the same food.

All we had done is taken those large wheat particles like porridge and just ground it down. They ate them at roughly the same speed even in that study, but it changed where it was absorbed. So by processing it more, it was absorbed higher up the gut where you don't have all of the fullness signals. The unprocessed one was lower down, where you have all of these fullness signals,

hence you had lots of GLP1 released, etc. People felt really full. And again, that just illustrates how we need to think about the food we're eating in terms of the form that we're eating it as well as looking at back-of-pack labelling and looking at, oh, yes, it does have lots of additives or, oh, it doesn't have enough fibre. Yes, that's important. But what does the food look like? Does it resemble the original food it came from? Or does it look like some mush where the matrix is destroyed? The texture is so soft. You're going to eat it fast. You're going

to over-eat it. You're going to absorb it more quickly. You're going to not feel so full. I super appreciate what you just said, because I think you've given people a new appreciation for the fact that one of the reasons, because we keep hearing like whole food, are best and it's specifically because where you absorb that food is lower down and the lower down absorption happens the cleaner the signal is from your body or stronger the signal is that you got that food and therefore can stop and so it makes it easier not to overeat. But you also dropped this kind of scary tidbit, which is the nutritional labeling, the packaging is identical. So what would you say to people who are like, okay, thanks for helping me. Like,

how do I go and take this to my shopping trip? I'm going to the supermarket. These labels say the same thing. All of your research and everything you're saying is these could have wildly different physiological responses when I go to eat them. You mentioned this one piece around, you know, looking for food that looks like food, looks like the whole food. Is this as simple as look for packaging that says, you know, whole grains?

What would you do here? I think it's really difficult. So difficult. most of the food that we eat doesn't resemble the plant that it came from. And so it's challenging. I mean, there is the message, and this is really boring, I know, that go and look at a food that looks like the original food came from, the original vegetable, the original poles, the original whole food.

You know, if you've got the choice of a whole apple or a smoothie, yes, the smoothie is going to have loads of great nutrients in, but go for the apple. You'll eat it more slowly. You'll feel more full. I know it's a boring message No one wants to hear that We want a silver bullet

So I would first say I'm sorry But it is the boring message Of choose the food that actually You can tell what the original food was In terms of, you know If you're going to a supermarket aisle And you've got different breakfast cereals It's a minefield

Because none of them really look like The food it comes from I struggle as a mum You know my kids want the cocoa pops Or what are those awful things Lucky Charms. We have those now in the UK. And okay, you look at the back of pack labelling and do you have cocoa pops here in the US? Like chocolate rice Krispies? Yes. Both of those, you look at the back of pack labelling. I would think as a parent, they're equally as bad as each other,

but you look at the Lucky Charms. And literally the ingredient list, I mean, I'm surprised they can even fit it on the box. You know, the amount of different additives, emulsifiers, the sugar levels, etc. In those situations, the backer pack labelling is very different. And so the, the backer pack labelling is very different. And so the back of pack labelling will help you. I think where it won't help you is where they just don't resemble the same food. You know, I'm sorry, I can't give anyone like this golden ticket to how to spot when the food matrix is intact and it isn't other than does it look like the food it's come from. Because what's in our supermarkets, probably only 10% does actually look like the original food and that's in the fruit and vegile. You know, the landscape that's out there,

It's just, you know, it's what I find really challenging as a nutrition scientist is the food landscape has changed at such a fast pace. It's changed, as you said early on, more quickly than we have evolved to handle it. But do you know what I'm realising over the last few years, it's changing even more quickly than we as researchers can research. And the research process takes a long time. So when I come up with an idea, I then have to apply for grant funding. You know, it might take one or two years before I get the grant. I then have to, you know, recruit the staff, set up all the protocols. By the time I've run the clinical trial, it's probably on average about six, seven years

post me having the idea. Then I have to write it up, hope it will get published, wait for the whole publication. So you're looking sometimes between eight years from having the idea to getting your research published. Which point the like food science. Yeah, up until 10 years ago, that was fine. But what I'm starting to see is a lot of the work I'm doing, particularly around food structure and fat structure. It's like, whoa, hold on.

Is that even relevant now? Things have changed so quickly. And so this is something that we're really, you know, struggling with, I think, that we need to be moving as fast as the food landscapes are moving. So that's a little bit terrifying. And I'd love to end on first a practical note and then a happy note. On a practical note, you know, are there three to five things that, you know, based on your research, you think, you know, every listener should take away.

So I think something that has become really apparent to me over the last 10 years with the work I've been doing at Zoe on our Predict cohort, which is this phenomenal cohort of over 250,000 people where we've been really diving into the complexity of who we are, of how we eat, why we make the choices that we eat and how we live our lives, is realizing that it's not just about the food that you eat. So I know we've done a really deep dive into the food matrix, but actually what we eat is this one piece of the puzzle. And we have had a lot of focus on this,

but I think we need to think holistically. There's many pillars to health. So there's the food that we eat, there's physical activity, there's sleep, there's stress. We need to think of all of that because we know that they all intersect. And so my advice to people would be,

yes, think about what you eat. And it's sensible, simple stuff. You know, try and eat as much whole food as possible, as much fruits, vegetables, pulse, as whole grains as possible. try and limit heavily processed foods, try and increase your fibre intake. But there's this whole area of how you eat that I think people can also leverage. And this is where we've had some really exciting research, how quickly you eat your food.

We know that on average 30% of people eat their food really quickly. We call them fast eaters. We know that's associated with excess energy intake, higher levels of obesity, worse inflammation, worse cardiovascular disease risk. we know that if you slow your eating rate down by just 20%, so have your breakfast in 12 minutes instead of 10 minutes, without even realizing it, you will subconsciously eat 15% less calories on average.

That's what the research shows. That's a lot. And what I love about that practically is that, well, it also says you can keep eating what you're eating. And if you slow it down, now you get to enjoy it for 12 minutes instead of 10. Yeah, unfortunately, I mean, so much of convenience packaging is like, like, eat your breakfast while you walk to work or drink your breakfast, right? And so you eat it faster and faster.

And what you're saying is I'm not going to get as full. I'm more likely to eat. And 15% is a lot. Yeah, 15% difference. So in studies where they give what's called adlibertum meals, where you're told, right, eat as much as you want. One day you're eating it in this time period, let's say 10 minutes. I'm making up these times, by the way.

but, and then another day, eat it in 12 minutes. When people are self-selecting, it will be on average about 15% difference in energy intake, so slowing it down. So that's one thing, we can all do that. I know we live crazy, busy lives. I know we're rushing food between meetings. Try and, if you can, prioritize, just slow it up.

We're talking a couple of minutes. So that's one thing you could do. The other thing is thinking about also the time period in which you're eating your food. So, you know, there's so much evidence now around time-restricted eating. so much evidence from tightly controlled clinical trials. Generally, it's reducing the eating window down six hours, so i.e. you eat within a six-hour period and then you have an 18-hour fast period.

That's associated improvements in metabolic health, in body composition, in body weight, in cardiovascular risk, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, huge benefits. But who wants to eat in six hours? I don't know about you, but there is no way I'm not eating that dinner with my friend or having a glass of wine before bed. You know, socially, I mean, it's pretty bloody boring life to eat in six hours. If it works for you, fine.

But we did a study called the Big If study where we asked people just eat within a 10-hour window, so you have a 14-hour fast period. We had 150,000 people do this. And this is from, again, our Zoe cohort. And what we found was that just by reducing it down to 10 hours, the average is about 12 to 13 hours, people's eating window. It's a bit longer in the US, unfortunately.

We saw significant improvements in weight. We saw significant... By the way, we told everyone, just eat your normal diet. This is the only thing you're changing. Significant improvements in mood, in energy, people felt us hungry. And so that's the other tip I would give is thinking about the time that you're eating, the duration that you're eating. And so these are all about how you're eating,

just because I think there's so many people talking about what you're eating. So that first one is slow down the speed. The second one is eat within a reasonable window. You don't need to be too restrictive unless that works, unless that's how you like to live. think about the time of day that you're eating your food. And so we know, again, from my own Zoe predict research, that 50% of people eat after 6pm, 30% of people are snacking after 9pm.

And it's fascinating that you see this on your loop outputs as well. That's amazing to link that up with something. You can see that physically. What we know is that people who are snacking after 9pm, they have increased risk of diseases. they are more likely to have type 2 diabetes, more likely to be at risk of cardiovascular disease, they tend to be more overweight, they tend to have higher inflammation, they tend to have worse blood lipids, etc, etc, etc.

This is even if they're snacking on healthy foods. And so that would be the third thing that I would say, thinking about the time that you're eating. And again, if we think about time restricted eating, the evidence is quite consistent. If you're front-loading your food, you have better health outcomes. And there's great studies that have looked, for example, where people are eating exactly the same throughout the day,

but in one group they're eating it also at the same time, but in one group they're having a bigger breakfast, bigger, moderate lunch, small dinner, or in the other group they're having a tiny breakfast, moderate lunch, huge dinner, even though they're the same times. You see differences, for example, the next day in hunger. People who are eating later also feel more hungry.

Am I allowed a fourth tip? Please. I'm being greedy, but I have come all the way from... You come all the way from London, you can have a fork. My fourth tip is, again, on this kind of way that we're eating is snacking. And we've done loads of research at Zoe and I have at Kings as well, lots of trials on snacking. I don't think it's something people think about enough beyond, oh, you know, snacking on bad food's bad for us. We know that 25% of our energy comes from snacks.

That's a huge amount. In the US and UK, 25% of energy, quarter of our calories. we know from our own research that I've done from clinical trials that if you just swap the typical US snack with a healthy snack, for example, we did a study at a clinical trial where we swapped the typical US snack with almonds. In as little as six weeks, you have a significant reduction in lots of different health outcomes

that actually equated to a 30% reduction in cardiovascular disease risk. So that's my fourth tip would be think about the types of snacks that you're having because you can make a huge difference there. under our own self-control. What I have for dinner is dictated by my fussy kids. What I have for lunch is dictated by where I am at that point in time. But I can, you know, maybe sometimes with a bit of planning, depending what I'm throwing in my bag that day when I go to work, we can under our self-control, you know, control the snacks we're having. And our research that we've done

at Zoe shows that snacking per se is not a problem. As long as you're having healthy snacks and as long as you're not snacking after nine at night, snacking is a really great way to improve the healthfulness of your diet. What I love about the recommendation to snack on almonds is that so much of the excuse for the crap that, pardon my language, but the junk that we eat when we snack, it's because it's shell-stable, it's portable, I can throw it in my purse, and it's good for four days or whatever. And it's like, okay, enter the almond, right? You can buy it in a snack pack. You can throw it in a little sandwich baggie or a little tin or whatever. Emily, I must also add that I have received funding from the Allman Board of California for some of my

studies. I always like to declare my conflict of interest. I think it's really important. However, as a scientist that's run more than 35 clinical trials, I would only talk about science that I truly believe in. So I'm not being paid in anyway to be here from them. But I just think it's important as a scientist that we always declare where we're getting our research funding from. Yeah, and I definitely appreciate the disclosure. And I think that there's a lot of support that, you know, nuts are healthy, including almonds. And I think that it's great to be reminded of snacks that can be just equally portable. You know, bananas get close, but you probably don't want to leave one in your bag for like a week. But, you know, that little bit of effort in the morning to set aside a healthier

snack is going to probably save you money, too, if you're not, like, running out to the corner store to go buy, you know, $2 bag of chips or something. So lots of reasons why that's a good a good swap. So I touch briefly on how WOOP has seen in our data that, you know, eating close to bedtime is really bad for recovery, really bad for sleep. One of the reasons I know that and I'm able to share it is because, you know, we've got millions of members all over the world who are telling us that they're eating late and then we can observe the impact on their recovery and their sleep and sleep quality and all those different Woop metrics because we have that data at a large scale. So to end on a super positive note, you had talked about

how, you know, when you get this great idea, even when you get funding, it could be six, eight years before you have results that you're ready to publish. And that's sort of the traditional academic way of doing nutrition research that you've done loads of in your role at King's College. But I'd love if you could just talk about how Zoe is doing research in a different way. And I think in a lot of really exciting ways, accelerating the rate at which we can do this kind of good research. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's this whole paradigm shift in how we're doing research. It's so exciting. So what we're doing at Zoe is leveraging novel technologies like all of these kind of technologies where people are recording, whether it's their activity,

their sleep. You know, all of these metrics that we know are so important in terms of directing our food choices as well as how we respond to food. We're leveraging other remote technologies for remote clinical testing like continuous glucose monitors, you know, saliva for tests for DNA, poo samples for the microphone, where people from the comfort of their armchair can become what we call a community scientist and where they can share their data with us just in the way that you've described, Roup users share their data with you. And we can learn in real time really quickly what's going on. And so all of the work that we're doing at ZORI is all done as part of a clinical trial.

So it's called our ZORIPredict studies. So when people buy the commercial product, which is this personalised nutrition app, they consent for their data to be shared with us as researchers, I imagine, in the same way, that you do very tightly control privacy and GDPR regulations, etc, etc. And so then the data comes to scientists like myself in a totally anonymised way, but quickly, almost like in real time. But what's important is we're quickly learning from this. There's this whole two-way exchange.

Firstly, an individual is seeing things in real time, just like from the root people can see in real time how a particular food is affecting their glucose from their glucose monitor, for example. But also, we're learning a scientist, and in a matter of weeks or months, we can feed back certain findings. So, for example, sleep, seeing so you've talked about sleep, we know that sleep impacts how you metabolise food, how you respond to food. It also impacts the food choices that you make. And we've seen this in our own data. we didn't need to put a grant in to come up with that pre-specified hypothesis to then recruit, you know, 30 people to run this tightly controlled study. By leveraging these novel technologies, we're collecting data at a scale, but also a breadth that allows us to look at, oh, we've got this idea on sleep or we've got this idea on heart rate variability, a depth and precision, you know, because the precision now of these wearables, it blows my mind.

I mean, I'm the biggest skeptic. And there's blood pressure watches out there that I was like, we can't possibly use these. Then you look at the validation data, and I always have to try these things out for myself as well because I'm such a skeptic. And, you know, and the photologuing, for example, that we're using at Zori as well,

where you take a picture. I mean, it can differentiate between parsley and coriander. I can only just about do that with my glasses on. You know, it's mind-blowing. And it's important to say there is a place, for these traditional trials that can only be done in a clinical setting or the mechanistic work where you have small numbers of people. There is an important role. But this new world that's opening up for us as researchers that allows us to collect that data, that breadth, depth and precision

is so exciting and so phenomenal. And that's why, for example, we are at Zoe able to piece together the billion different pieces of what shapes how we respond to food, what shapes our health, outcomes because it's rare in one of the kind of traditional nutrition studies you would collect the data about the food people eating as well as their sleep their exercise their heart rate variability you know all of these different metrics you know how people are feeling this is a whole new area as well that we're starting to we ask people every day how do you feel what's your mood your energy and hunger I've never done that in my previous trials that's like oh that's a bit like woo-ro you know you need subjective you know clinical measure of it from a blood sample but

actually what matters is how you're feeling. And I've been wearing this loop now for a couple of days and I've been flying all over the place. My sleep is literally mental. And last night I got my first good night's sleep. And then it's nice you see it play out in these metrics and okay, I know I feel better, but then seeing it actually playing out in like my heart rate variability went up overnight because I slept, my resting heart rate. And it's like that affirmation to me that oh yeah how I feel is playing out in these physical metrics and I think people seeing that in real time with the work we're doing at Zoe as well as how we're advancing the field of nutrition science it's so exciting so that was a long answer but I get so excited about all of these new technologies

yeah and I think like just to kind of summarize that you know I've been at whoop for a little bit under 12 years now and the reason why I've like been here so long and why I still love my job is that you know, in the, a byproduct of creating this consumer wearable, this product, we're also creating this unprecedented data set. And we're able to, and we do publish, you know, through the traditional academic process of peer review and all of that, tons of articles and lots of research that would just be completely impractical through traditional academic research. And, you know, I have full respect for traditional academic research, but it's really incredible to be able to contribute just at this unprecedented pace. And I think Zoe's doing

very similar things. And it's really exciting to me to see that, you know, while it's a little bit scary sometimes to think that, you know, the industry and food science is moving at a pace that historically we haven't been able to keep up with on the research side, I do think we're making really good ground on the research side. And we're going to get to a place where we can understand those things faster and give people good advice faster. So definitely exciting future ahead. I think so. With these novel technologies, I think we can keep a pace with the changing food landscape.

But I think we can also piece together the complexity and start to work with food industry, which is really important to help improve the healthfulness of the products, but also for people at an individual level through these different devices to understand what works for them, what doesn't work for them. Lots and lots of juicy stuff in this conversation. Thank you so much for flying out here to be with us. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you.

It's lots of fun. Worth the jet lag. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social. At Woop at Wip at WMead. If you have a question to us answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-434349552. If you think about joining Woop, you can visit Woop.com.

Sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members can use the code Will, W-I-L-L, to get a $60 credit on Woop accessories when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the Woop podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.